Patched Dress

 

So, I ripped one of my favorite dresses! I was sitting on a cheap lawn chair and it broke! How embarrassing! The experience left this huge rip on the back of my denim dress. (I put a piece of white cardstock underneath so you could see the rip)

If you know a bit about sewing you can tell that this is not a very easy tear to mend. The threads are literally stripped apart! So, I came up with an idea...see below:

 

 

 

What do you think? I have always wanted to embellish my clothes and now I have. This tear gave me the opportunity and I took it! I'm always afraid of calling attention to myself because I am so self-conscious, but since I've been getting older....I don't seem to care as much. That's one plus to getting older!  At least, for me!

 

so I took some fabric that I had on hand, uhhum*....and I cut out some flowers with my Big Shot tool and dies. I layered them on my dress and appliqued them with my sewing machine. Oh, and first I stitched up the tear and put the flowers over it. Easy peasy! I even got a compliment at church the next time I wore the dress. No one even noticed this dress before...So a little creativity goes a long way!

 

*just a note to those who don't know me very well- I belong to the "let's see who can collect the most fabric before you die" club. I have a lot of fabric on hand, oh yeah, baby! (I'm gonna win......!!! hee, hee:)

Thanks for looking and I appreciate any comments you may have!

"You are Beautiful"

I painted another canvas with one of my other favorite sayings. I like to collect quotes. Here is a picture:

I am collecting quotes that are positive and help to remind me to be positive. I also collect positive affirmations. I love to journal. Writing is therapeutic for me and also helps me to keep all my thoughts in order or at least where I can see them. It's kinda like cleaning out all the clutter in my head so I can put more inspiring things back into it. Painting is something that I've also had a desire to do but could never feel like it was a "valuable" activity. I have since thrown out all my reasons NOT to do painting and I am currently deciding which of my canvases to paint next...

I would love to hear what you think of this canvas....comments are always welcome and desired. Thanks for visiting my blog.



This is a wedding gift I made recently for another friend of mine who just got married in May. She is actually a daughter of my friend, and I  have watched her grow up over the years. The base is a piece of wood and I put a hanger on the back of it to make it easier to hang. I took the wedding invitation and took it apart, then put it together on this plaque. Now it is a keepsake for all to see when it is hanging in their home. I hope they hang it up!

I made all of the flowers out of cardstock. It was a lot of fun seeing them come together and I think they are really cool. I tried to make everything look a little bit vintage by adding some off white paint to the edges of the flowers, the frames, and the background. If you are curious on how I made the flowers let me know and I can let you know, or you can do a search online at youtube.com. There are a lot of videos already made and a lot of them are about flowers.

Thanks for looking!

Art Journal page

I have also been working in my art journal. This is a page I did recently. It says, "Every journey has its rough spots, choose to get through them...you will only grow STRONGER. This kind of goes with the song by Kelly Clarkson- What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I like that message. It speaks of strength and overcoming struggles, or disappointments. I did spray paint the background and if you are wondering, yes, there is some fog there. Let me know what you think, thanks!

The other book pages for the fabric book

This is my painted page and the fifth page in this fabric book posting. I am not necessarily putting them in the order that I posted them. I will show you, of course, the book once it is put together. Then I will keep working on it.

Here is what I call the flower page. I actually took pictues of how I made this one. It is a little brighter, darker in real life. I like how it turned out.

Thanks for looking!

More fabric pages

Here is another fabric page for my book. I started with spraying it with inks

and then I put some rock salt on top of it and that's how I got all

that texture.

This is my blue page. It didn't turn out like I wanted it to. What I did was to spray some ink through a stencil to make that additional "wall paper" like pattern. The page was very wet and some of the ink flowed together, that's why there is a "smudge." It doesn't matter though. I am going to be covering it up with other things.

Fabric Book beginnings

Saturday I worked on making some fabric pages for a book I am going to make. I cut the canvas and used Stampin' Up!s ink refills to "paint" these pages. I am going to put them together in a book, but I wanted to post the original backgrounds before I stuck more "things" on top of them. 

Picture below is why I call this blog "dirty fingers." I have so much fun working with all my art supplies. My hands get pretty messy!

Another page--

This is what I call my "bird cage" page. The whole page is in the picture below.

I'll be posting some more pages in the coming days. Stop by and let me know what you think. Thanks.

I made this 4x6 exchange card a while ago. I actually made two of them, both were very different from each other. This was my favorite one that I want to put in my portfolio. I love how the sprayed inks formed paint patterns on this card. The shiny circles with the beads around them are little mirrors that I picked up at Walmart on clearance one day. I have some very sheer purple leaves on here, paint, rhinestones, and acrylic beads. The flower is made of designer paper that I formed and painted. This was a lot of fun.

Wedding gift 2

Here is the second wedding gift I made for another couple who got married around the same time as the first couple. This one has a different color scheme as you can see. On this one I used gold accents with cream colored lace and beading. It was fun to make. I hope they like it and put it on their wall to remember their wedding day.



A close up of the flowers. I punched out several flower shapes and attached them together in the center with a brad. I them sprayed them with water and scrunched them up one or two layers at a time. I then let them dry and they became hard in the shapes you see them in.